aidanf.net

There are several url shortening services such as tinyurl.com, url.ie, urltea.com and many more. These work by keeping a database of urls and redirecting requests to the appropriate urls.

I’ve noticed a rise in the use of these services in recent months. In conjunction with this I’ve started to see what I would regards as inappropriate uses of these services.

Appropriate use

I think there are a couple appropriate uses for tinyurls:

1) Microblogging. Services such as twitter and jaiku restrict the size of your post. E.g. twitter posts are restricted to 140 characters. So using a url shortening service makes sense in these cases as spare characters are often in short supply.

2) Really long urls in text. If the url is really long i.e. long enough to cause a line break then it may be appropriate to replace it with a tinyurl. For example some email clients will break a long url over two lines making it annoying for the receiver to paste into a web browser.

I’ve increasingly noticed tinyurls being used in other situations. E.g. In blog posts, emails and even recently in national newspapers. Why use a tinyurl in a blog post when you can use a link? I recently saw a blog post where all the urls had been replaced by tinyurls. I’ve also received emails where all the urls were tinyurls.

Reasons to restrict your use of tinyurls

There is one major reason and a few minor reasons to restrict your use of tinyurls.

Meaning and Context

Tinyurls remove context. This is the absolutely most important reason not to use tinyurls if your can avoid it. It removes all context and gives no clue as to what it points at. The only way to find our what a tinyurl points to is to follow it. This breaks a common web navigation paradigm.

If I see a link on a blog or in a blog comment I can hover over the text of the link and see where it points to in the status bar of my browser. E.g. I might see that it points to flickr so I know it’s a picture. This gives me context about the link. I might recognize the link, or the site that the link is on, or I might be able to tell what kind of file it is. The actual link is an important part of my decision as to whether I follow the link or not. This is a common navigational behaviour.

Similarly links in emails or text give valuable context about that link. Seeing what the link points to helps the user decide whether to follow it or not. Tinyurls hide this information.

Trust

As the use of tinyurls rises this issue if trust becomes more important. The removal of context is a boon for spammers. It’s easier to trick a user into clicking on a tinyurl than a real spam url. It’s easy to send people to bad sites with tinyurls. A link to a porn site looks the same as a tinyurl as a link to any other site.

Longevity

If tinyurl.com disappeared in the morning, all the tinyurl links will no longer work. If tinyurl decided to sell their database to Acme Spam Co. they could make all the existing links point to new pages of their choosing.

Inefficiency

Instead of going directly to a link you introduce an extra intermediary step. Each link becomes a link and a redirection.

So in summary, only use tinyurls if you really need to shorten the url. For blogs, blog comments, emails, newsgroups etc using the original url is usually a better choice than using a shortened url.